PROGRAM NOTES UNDERWRITTEN BY THOMAS WARD

Born in San Juan, Argentina, Juan Pablo Jofre Romarion, popularly known as J. P. Jofre, is a GRAMMY-nominated composer and bandoneon virtuoso. Having written several double concertos with chamber and symphony orchestras, and more than 40 chamber music works, Jofre has been repeatedly highlighted by the New York Times and praised as one of today’s leading artists by Great Performers at Lincoln Center. His music has been recorded by the legendary London Symphony Orchestra, multi-Grammy award winner Paquito D’ Rivera, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra among others. He has performed and given lectures at Google Talks, TED Talks, Juilliard, The New School, and other venues. A recipient of the National Prize of the Arts grant in Argentina, Jofre has been part of many prestigious festivals around the globe. As a soloist, composer, and leader of the J. P. Jofre Quintet, Jofre has appeared at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Music Center, and in halls from Moscow to Seoul.

The first recording of The Fifth Season featured Jofre on bandoneón with violinist Karen Gomyo and pianist Ayako Kanisasere. As Jofre puts it, “I had long hoped to collaborate again with violinist Karen Gomyo after our memorable performance at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music . . . The opportunity aligned perfectly while I was in Tokyo for a concert with shō player and pianist Ayako Kanisasere. We recorded the piece at Tokyo Opera City Studio, with the brilliant sound engineer Kohán.” Jofre started work on The Fifth Season while in Manhattan during the pandemic lockdown in 2020. “Amidst the uncertainty of that time, I imagined what the future might hold – when suddenly, the main theme of the piece came to me. It carried a mix of hope and sorrow that moved me deeply. A few weeks later, I received a commission from violinist and music director Michael Guttman and pianist David Fung. I decided to develop the themes, already captivated by the first eight bars.”

The Fifth Season is a single ternary-form movement. The opening pulses with a quiet gravity, not unlike the Adagio movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto. Quickly Jofre’s lyric vein opens into lovely, expansive melodies colored by rich accompaniment. In this new arrangement for chamber ensemble, Jofre makes excellent use of vibraphone and string quintet as companions to his impassioned bandoneon solo. The middle portion grows increasingly angular and unsettled, aspects that only enhance the calming impact of the opening theme’s quiet return at the close. Jofre’s title pays homage to the legendary Ástor Piazzolla – heard later this morning – whose Four Seasons of Buenos Aíres (1970) remains a pivotal work in Argentinian and world chamber music.

The French composer Jean Cras (1879-1932), born in the Breton city of Brest, spent the majority of his life as a naval officer. His father had been a naval physician, and Jean began serving his country already during his teenage years. A musical penchant existed from early days, but his professional duties forced that aspect onto the margins of his life. However, like several famous contemporaries – Russian chemist Alexander Borodin or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, himself a naval officer – Cras managed to keep active in composition while successfully fulfilling his career outside music. During World War I he spent many hours working on an ambitious opera. After the war, as his rank continued to rise and his work shifted more toward governance, Jean could devote increased time to music. He wrote numerous songs, piano pieces, and works for large ensemble, but he always felt that chamber music suited his aesthetic best.

In 1929 Cras published a Quintet for Harp, Flute, and String trio. The work shows a deep respect for the style of his longtime friend and teacher Henri Duparc, as well as similarities with the music of Debussy and Ravel, Cras’ two famous contemporaries. The Quintet benefits from related works Cras completed during the preceding years. These include two Impromptus for Solo Harp (1925) and a Suite for Harp and Flute (1927). Both display an expert handling of the harp. The inspiration for Cras in this quintet came from a particular new ensemble founded in the 1920s by flutist René le Roy. The Quintette instrumental de Paris (a fixed ensemble of flute, harp, violin, viola, and cello) became a dominant chamber music force, performing nearly 2,000 concerts over its 40 year reign.

The Quintet for Harp, Flute, and Strings unfolds across four movements, each equal in scale. The first flows as smoothly as water atop rippling pages of harp arpeggios. Cras creates a broad sonic canvas between very high and very low pitches, as well as using non-directional tonal collections à la Debussy (pentatonic and whole-tone) that produce chords that float and drift rather than drive forward. On the other hand, he injects a slew of short contrasting episodes marked by greater rhythmic action and percussive energy. The result is a lush reverie updated by touches of post-war modernism. Indeed, during the second movement, Cras presents less melody than musical atmosphere in a series of fitful, but delightful, episodes. As can be clearly heard in the meditative third movement, labeled a passacaglia by one modern critic, Cras enjoys working with small motives that repeatedly appear and morph like successive dabs of changing color. At the close he places a vibrant, mercurial finale filled with sun and wind and perhaps the sea. He completed the work in April 1928 while stationed at Toulon on the French Riviera.

Contemporary American composer Allan Blank (1925-2013) started his musical education in New York, gaining admittance to Juilliard through his talent as a skilled violinist. He continued further schooling in New York and schools in the Midwest before attaining a spot in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1950. Despite the man’s obvious talent for performance, his legacy appears to have survived primarily through his work as a composer and educator. Indeed, it was in the capacity of composer that he served at several universities, including Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond before his death in 2013. Blank wrote in numerous genres, though he had a particular gift for chamber music. He received numerous commissions and won several major composition competitions, including from the Eastman School of Music (1985) and the Lind Solo Song Competition (1989). Blank’s legacy also generously supports a new generation of musicians through the Allan & Margot Blank Foundation, a grant source that prioritizes funding for the performance and creation of new American chamber music.

In 1974 Blank set Four Poems by Emily Dickinson for soprano, flute, and clarinet. Space cannot endorse a thorough discussion of Dickinson or these four representative poems. Each comes from a different period of her life. The earliest is the glib little epigram “Surgeons must be very careful” from 1859, a time when she had already produced several hundred youthful texts whose value Dickinson herself still did not trust. She composed “Nature is what we see” around 1863, a period of incredibly productivity, followed by “In this short life” a decade later. By that time, her flow of verse had slowed but never stopped. Among the later poems Blank chose “How happy is the little stone” (1881). Early feedback convinced Dickinson that she would either have to abandon her “odd” style or push onward as an unappreciated revolutionary. She chose the latter path and bequeathed nearly 1,800 poems to posterity, though fully half were completely unknown until after her death.

About Blank’s musical setting of Four Poems by Emily Dicksinon, a short program note on the American Composers Alliance website adds:

Angular, taut, centrifugal, highly dramatic. The composer sculpts every syllable of the romantic recluse’s spare verse, and surrounds the straining singer with virtuoso woodwind rustling reminiscent of the “harmony of nature” that is the subject of the final poem. The lack of a piano or other harmony instrument in this work, makes the texture unforgiving of miscalculation. Blank saves the flute-clarinet duet for the two outer songs, restricting the accompaniment of the central two to flute and then to clarinet alone. His use of tritones as structural points is familiar, but his use of unisons, octaves and other intervals considered consonant, highlights the complex textural interplay of the three lines.

Argentine tango composer Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992) spent much of his youth living in New York and was exposed to world-class performances of both jazz and classical music, which inspired lessons at first on piano. He soon turned his focus to the bandoneon, the distinctive instrument of tango orchestras he knew from his childhood. With support from the Argentine government, Piazzolla earned a chance to study abroad with Boulanger at the Fontainebleau Conservatory. Piazzolla was no mere youth seeking new experiences; he was now 33 years old, married with children, and artistically exhausted with what he felt could be achieved in tango. Boulanger introduced greater sophistication and contrapuntal depth to his style, but she wisely advised Piazzolla to stay true to his roots.

During the first year in Paris in 1954, Piazzolla composed a heartfelt bandoneon melody in honor of his father, nicknamed “Nonino”, who was home in Argentina caring for Piazzolla’s two young children. Five years later Nonino died in an accident, and news of his passing reached Piazzolla while on tour in Puerto Rico. Within hours he composed Adiós Nonino as a tribute to his father, utilizing the melody he had previously composed and adding further accompaniment. Today’s arrangement by J. P. Jofre opens with the main theme, whose nostalgic beauty has become a symbol to Argentines around the globe of their absent homeland. The music grows animated, proceeding to more fraught, percussive and strident gestures that yield to a tender reprisal of the melody played in counterpoint between viola and cello. True to Piazzolla’s own spirit, Jofre continues a lively interplay between lyricism and tension throughout.

Jason Stell, © 2026